Raimund Baumschlager, aged 53, has won the Austrian championship an amazing 10 times throughout his career and is one of the most experienced drivers on the International Jännerrallye.
Yet even Baumschlager says that his experience is only useful half the time on round one of the FIA European Rally Championship.
“Of course experience helps, but on an event like this your experience just comes down to a feeling, and of course your feeling can be wrong,” said Baumschlager. “This year is quite tricky as normally we have more snow, but of course you can use your knowledge of the event from the past to anticipate what the conditions might be like. Around 50 per cent of the time you get it right, but the rest of the time you are wrong.”
Baumschlager was the only top driver to use narrow tyres, which bite through the ice and snow to find grip underneath, in the morning. In the afternoon he reverted to wider tyres but once more he was able to read the road better than the others to pull out a slender advantage after five stages only to slip back to second overall on stage six.
“You can’t predict the conditions but after all this time I’ve learnt a bit about the roads and that maybe gives me a help,” he concluded.